The Costs of the Energy ‘Transition’ Won’t Be ‘Transitory’

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The appointment of Christine Lagarde as president of the European Central Bank was never going to bode very well for the way that the ECB is run. Lagarde is a politician, not a banker, and, as to her attitudes to rules, well, many of those who followed the euro zone crisis (a time when Lagarde was France’s finance minister) will remember her comments after those in charge approved the first Greek bailout.

Reuters (December 2010):

“We violated all the rules because we wanted to close ranks and really rescue the euro zone,” Lagarde was quoted as saying.

“The Treaty of Lisbon was very straight-forward. No bailout.”

Oh well.

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Watching the Skies: Prudence, not Paranoia

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Sure, sure, there was last year’s intelligence report and this year’s congressional hearing. But you really know that UFOs/UAPs are having a moment when they turn up in the Financial Times’ storied Lex column — albeit in a piece that has a faint but unmissable “crazy American” subtext and is a touch disapproving….

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Adam (Smith) and EVs: Going in Different Directions

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Central planning is not exactly the best way of organizing an economy (#understatement). That’s true, whether we look at the colossal failures of communism or, for that matter, many less ambitious attempts to manage an economy by decree.

Central planning lite (or relatively lite) has been a feature of the energy “transition” now underway in much of the West for some time. As this transition proceeds, the difficulties flowing from its reliance on aggressive, unrealistic and arrogant directives from above are becoming all too apparent, from the woes associated with wind energy — a technology clearly not ready to fulfill the role assigned to it by the climate technocracy — to growing evidence that forcing people away from conventional autos into electric vehicles is going to lead to immense problems that appear not to have been anticipated. (This may a charitable explanation. Perhaps those in charge were well aware of the problems but were determined to press on regardless. Omelets, eggs, we know that script.)

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A Heretic in the Climate Church

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Scientists have traditionally tended to appreciate the usefulness of disagreement or, where necessary, to take it in stride and move on. (A flat Earth, you say? Oookay.) But in many faiths, dissent is heresy. The offender must be cast out, or worse.

Moral Money is, as its name implies, a particularly sanctimonious corner of the Financial Times. It is focused on the likes of ESG (a variant of “socially responsible” investing that measures actual or potential portfolio companies against environmental, social, and governance standards), “stakeholder capitalism,” and other facets of a kumbaya capitalism superior to the Gekko-hearted incumbent, or so the cleverly marketed corporatist story goes.

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Demolishing a Distorted Past

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Conquerors like to remind the conquered of who is in charge. One way of doing so is by the construction of monuments, symbols of the new order — and by their permanence, of its permanence. The Soviets were no exception to this rule, distinguishing themselves only by the ugliness and, not infrequently, the gigantism of the works they fashioned. Not far enough from the center of the Latvian capital, Riga, there’s an archetypal example of this genre: overbearing, grandiloquent, and brutal. It dates from the later years of the Soviet occupation, a time when the Kremlin was using memories of the “Great Patriotic War” to bolster a regime struggling to deal with ideological failure, economic stagnation, and growing disaster in Afghanistan.

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On the Baltic Frontier

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Toomas Hendrik Ilves. Estonia’s president between 2006 and 2016, is not known for mincing his words about Russia. Nevertheless, as we drove towards a restaurant amid the refurbished industrial buildings and new waterfront apartments in a neighborhood that is a monument of sorts to Estonia’s astonishingly successful tech sector, it was evident that, had circumstances allowed, he would rather have been talking about the future that this small, determined nation is making for itself than about the latest poisonous eruption from the past.

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The imperfect spy

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On one level, Lis Wiehl’s enthralling and grimly astonishing A Spy in Plain Sight is simply the story of Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent whose espionage activities were described by the Department of Justice as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in US history,” a crowded field even at the time of his arrest in February 2001. “Over twenty-two years,” explained the DOJ in a 2002 report, Hanssen had “given the Soviet Union and Russia vast quantities of documents and computer diskettes filled with national security information of incalculable value.” And his betrayals had cost lives. Wiehl cites three (although there will have been more): each had been fingered as American agents by both Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, Hanssen’s predecessor as, in Wiehl’s description, “the most notorious spy in modern US history,” which gave the Soviets the corroboration they appear to have required.

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Unimaginable, imagined, imaginary

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The rage of the totalitarian state never ebbs, but the pace at which it kills can vary, sometimes being spasms of spontaneous-seeming violence, sometimes a slower, relentless closing of the trap….

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Legends Of the Black Sea

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When the Argonauts—so the story goes—sailed toward the Black Sea, they had to deal with giants, harpies and murderous women. When, in April 2018, Jens Mühling, a German journalist and a writer, arrives on the Black Sea coast during the early stages of the journey he so vividly describes in “Troubled Water,” he ends up drinking—a river of alcohol flows through this book—with a Russian (Oleg, naturally) and a Crimean Tatar (Elvis, naturally) in the courtyard of a rundown fishing cooperative on the western tip of Russia’s Taman Peninsula. A mile away, a newly built bridge awaits its formal opening. It connects the peninsula with Russian-occupied Crimea: “We screwed up our eyes, shelled Black Sea shrimps, and observed the world’s largest country in the act of growing.”

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Elon Musk’s Twitzkrieg?

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How Twitter polices speech on its platform is, assuming it remains within the law, up to Twitter. If those who run the company wish to do so in a way that offends our notions of free expression, that is, with one crucial exception, solely up to them. Twitter is privately owned, and the U.S. government has no business regulating how legal conversations are supervised behind the company’s virtual walls. Nor, for that matter, should any “independent” body be set up under the auspices of the state to review Twitter’s speech policy.

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